


Between the Candle and the Star

by MrProphet



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 22:52:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 3,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10706829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	1. The Ranger's Prologue and Tale

Anaren was not much in the habit of speaking to his passengers, however much they talked to him. He wore the black cloak and turquoise lozenge of the Anla’shok, but he was still getting used to the idea that humans might be accepted as Rangers, which was perhaps why he was flying this shuttle. Those he flew to Minbar in his shuttle did little to reconcile him to the idea; they were too brash, too noisy, too talkative to ever meet the standards of discipline required of a Ranger.

This one was different. They had been on the shuttle for almost nine days – hers was a very remote world – and she had yet to speak a word. She just ate, slept, and when she was not doing either of those, sat in the back of the cabin with her hood pulled down over her face. Maybe that was why she fascinated Anaren so much.

“What is your name?” he asked at last.

The hood turned slightly towards him. “Wood,” she said at last. “What is yours?”

“Anaren.” There was a long pause. “Most humans have more than one name.”

“I did have; I don’t use them anymore.” After another pause, she drew the hood back from her face, or rather from what was left of it. “Do you think I’m hideous?”

“I think all humans are hideous.”

The scarred remnants of Wood’s face contorted weirdly; the effect was quite disturbing until Anaren realised that she was smiling.

“I chose my name to match my fate,” she explained.

“I do not understand.”

“It’s an old Earth story, about a man named Henry Wood.” She drew a small book from inside her cloak. “Mine isn’t quite the same, but…”

“How did it happen?” Anaren asked.

Wood’s face twisted into a smile again. “It was about love,” she explained. And then for the first time, she really began to talk.

*

‘I was a deckhand on board a yacht when the war – the Earth-Minbari War, that is – began; nothing special about me, but when I signed up I was quickly made a leading crewwoman; they didn’t have many experienced crew to work with.

‘I was assigned to act as aide to a second lieutenant named… No; names don’t matter. He was the exec aboard a Hyperion cruiser, so we spent all the hours God sent us getting hammered here and there by Minbari gun crews. After a month of duty, we all realised that either we were the lucky bastards in Earth Force or some Minbari wag had painted a mark on our bows telling their gunners to play around with us.

‘Truth was, of course, it was neither of those. In fact, there were three things that kept us alive. The captain – Commander Gresham – was good; he was  _real_  good. Maybe we couldn’t hit one of your cruisers if she was sitting still, but he danced us round your fire like the old  _Mnemosyne_  was one of those new White Stars. Then there was Scotty – Chief Engineer McNair. He kept us flying with spot-welds and hope sometimes, but he did keep us flying. 

‘And then there was me.

‘Oh yes, I was  _that_  good, and cute as a button with it. For a while, I was the darling of the ship. My officer looked almost as good in the uniform as I did, but it was I who kept the crews together in the thick of battle and I who made sure discipline prevailed when the airlocks were falling off. I was a good crewwoman, but I discovered a flair for command in that war.

‘After a few weeks they made me up to petty officer and then they gave me a short-term field promotion to second lieutenant. My boss was made up to first lieutenant to stay exec, because his mother was an admiral, but by then everyone knew that the captain was treating me like the first officer.

‘This might have been bad enough for him to bear, but then the idiot he decided he was in love with me. He suggested we ask the captain to marry us, I told him it was traditional to propose first, and perhaps even date a few times. He was used to silly girls who fell for his money and he took rejection badly.

‘A few days later, we were trapped in an asteroid field. We knew that there was a Minbari cruiser out there, so we couldn’t signal for help. For once the exec did good and came up with a plan; carry a signal buoy out to the edge of the field on a fighter to lure the Minbari away long enough to break out of the field and make the jump to hyperspace. The crew were exhausted, shell-shocked and most of them were injured, so I volunteered to fly the Starfury.

‘The exec rigged up the beacon with a timer so it would start transmitting half-an-hour after I released it, or that’s what he said. In fact, I was still flying to the drop-off point on manoeuvring thrusters when it started transmitting.

‘I suppose I was lucky only to catch the edge of the beam which punched through the asteroids and vaporised the beacon, but it still cooked all of my systems and took out my life support. I spun out of control, the air venting from my smashed faceplate. I would have died, but…

‘There was another Minbari ship in the area; a Ranger scout vessel. It swooped in and picked me up. My face had been cut to ribbons by broken glass and scorched by the proximity of the beam. My right arm had been burned off so fast I hadn’t noticed; this one is artificial. I expected to be questioned and allowed to die of my injuries, if I was not executed.

‘Instead, the Rangers did what they could to stabilise me and then let me off near Aldrin Station to drift into pick-up range in a captured Starfury. Before they let me go, their captain told me that the  _Mnemosyne_  had escaped and that he had never known that humans could show such courage.

‘I told my story at Aldrin and recuperated there until the Minbari advance came close. The  _Mnem_  was one of the ships that came to evac us and I went aboard. They were surprised to see me.

‘I told the captain and the exec what had happened, without making any accusations. While we were in hyperspace, the exec let himself out of the airlock.’

*

“I can not believe that a man would do that out of love,” Anaren said. “On Minbar, that is not what love is.”

“Maybe not,” Wood allowed, “but like I say, for us it’s an old, old story.” She held out the book to Anaren. “You can read it if you like; give it back when you’re done.”

Anaren took the book. It was a slim, hardback volume with gossamer-thin pages. The title was etched in gold lettering on the spine:  _The Complete Sherlock Holmes_ , by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

“But you don’t know…” Anaren began, but she stopped him with a look.

“The Rangers are my family now,” she said. “I knew that when they rescued me. I don’t need to know you because I know that you’re like me.”

“Yes,” he agreed, surprised to find that it was true.


	2. Becoming

Wood knelt before Anla’shok Na, her biological arm trembling almost uncontrollably. She felt awkward to be in the presence of this great man, a crippled, broken creature like her, but she swallowed her fear and focused on the reason.

“We are Rangers,” she said. “We walk in the dark places where no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no-one will pass. We live for the One; we die for the One.”

“In service, you are reborn, Anla’shok Wood,” Sheridan Entil’Zha announced. Anaren approached and hung the grey and black coat of a Ranger around her shoulders and Entil’Zha fastened it with the turquoise badge of the corps. 

F’hursna Sech Durhan approached and laid a denn’bok in Wood’s hands. “Anla’shok; the application of force,” he said. “Seldom have I taught a student who exemplified that philosophy so… directly.”

Wood felt herself smile at that and suddenly… It wasn’t the badge, or the coat, or even the pike. It was Entil’Zha and Anaren and Durhan; her comrades-in-arms, standing by her, touching her twisted form, without self-consciousness or disgust. 

Suddenly, she felt whole again.


	3. Application of Force

“I suppose it would be pointless to tell you to give yourselves up?” Anaren asked softly.

The five men chuckled. They had Anaren and his partner surrounded; four of them carried PPGs while the leader held a squat, evil-looking alien weapon; one of the self-same weapons that the two Rangers had been tracking.

The leader and three others had their weapons trained on Anaren, seeing him – six foot of Warrior-caste Minbari in the peak of condition – as a more serious threat than five-foot nothing of human woman.

“I reckon we’d rather put two more bodies in the river,” the leader sneered. “Unless there’s anything to make you worth keeping alive. What d’you say, darlin’?” he asked Anaren’s partner. “You hidin’ a pretty face under that hood?”

Wood pushed back her hood and – just because he’d made her mad – smiled at the man.

Two of the men shuddered at the sight of Wood’s ruined face, the leader recoiled and a fourth – clearly very sensitive for an arms dealer – doubled over and vomited. The last did not get a clear view, and for his good fortune received a blow to the throat with the butt of a Minbari fighting pike. The leader might have recovered, but a second sweep of the pike laid him low.

By the time Anaren’s pike had expanded, the two men were incapacitated and the other three were staring at Wood in abject terror.

“And what if I ask you to surrender?” she asked, in a voice as blunt and brutal as her fighting style.

Three PPGs clattered onto the deck of the station. Wood was physically hideous, cynical and savage, but Anaren had to admit that she had a truly extraordinary facility for the use of violence.


	4. Standing on the Bridge

The caverns were ancient, hewn from the rocks millennia before by engines of unfathomable power. Through the intervening ages, gas had leaked up from deep underground; a volatile vapour which made modern weapons and technology, with their sparks and their plasma bursts and their heat sources, a dangerous liability. That was why the guards carried wooden spears.

The guards pursued the intruders at a furious pace, howling in rage that their sacred space had been defiled. They were but recent interlopers themselves, of course, but they still thought themselves the rightful holders of an ancient legacy.

The two Rangers stopped upon a narrow bridge.

“This seems the place,” Anaren said.

“It is,” Wood agreed, “for me. Go on; warn the others, bring reinforcements. What is buried here must stay buried.”

“I will not run from battle,” Anaren insisted. 

“You will run if I order it,” Wood assured him. “There are too many to hold this bridge forever, but I can buy you the time you need. Now go.”

“Anla'shok Wood...”

Wood's denn'bok fighting pike snapped open. “Go!” she demanded, and he could not deny her authority.

As Anaren ran, Wood turned to face her pursuers. “We are Rangers!” she declared as she batted a spear from the air. “We walk in the dark places where no others will enter!” She strode forward, deflecting a second throw. “We stand on the bridge and no-one will pass.” The denn'bok whirled, striking down two of the guards. “We live for the One; we die for the One!”

The warriors charged, spears hungry for Wood's blood, and the Ranger met them with courage and fury.

*

Less than a day later, the Rangers came in force and swept the caverns clean. They found a cybernetic arm, clutching the parapet in a death grip, but no other sign of Wood.

“She will be remembered,” Lead Ranger Smith told Anaren.

“She is not dead,” Anaren insisted, and taking the arm he went down into the caverns to seek his lost partner; his absent friend.


	5. Pike

The jewelled cloak pin attracted a great deal of attention in the shadows of the undercity, but one look at the Minbari's grim face dissuaded all but the most determined of footpad and most of the rest were put off by the sight of an arm hanging in a sling on his back. Those who would not be warned had to reckon with Anaren's fighting pike and all of those regretted that they were not better at taking a hint.

After five weeks in the caverns, the Ranger's cloak was tattered and scorched and steeped in the volatile gas from the vents. A shot from a PPG would probably have lit him up like a supernova, but he walked tall none the less. It was in his eyes that the real damage showed; a deep and terrible weariness.

He wandered through the bazaar of the undercity like a zombie, barely noticing the sights and sounds around him, reacting even to attempts at theft with a half-hearted pummelling.

It was only when he saw the short cylinder on one of the stalls that he lifted his head and took notice. He snatched the item up, throwing down a fistful of coins in exchange.

“Found something that catches your eye?” the stallholder asked, gathering up the coins. “A little trinket for a lady friend?”

“Something like that,” he agreed. He touched a hidden stud and the denn'bok sprang to its full length. “Someone brought this out of the tunnels, which means they might have brought her out as well. Where did you get this?”

“Oh, you don't want to mess with the people who sold me that,” the stallholder warned. “Perhaps I can offer you...”

Anaren grinned dangerously and brought out his own fighting pike, catching the stallholder's neck between the two.

“Trust me,” he said in a soft voice. “I want to mess.”


	6. Clarity

"Is your arm troubling you?"

Wood flexed her hand, watching with distracted fascination as the muscles shifted smoothly beneath the pale skin. She held both hands out together, reagarding critically the difference between the two. Her left hand was strong and brown, the fingers callused and the arm smooth with powerful muscle; the right was thin and pale, the skin almost translucent and soft as a baby's.

"Is your arm troubling you, Asah'deh?"

Wood looked up at J'kesh, his strange, simian face twisted into a parody of a human smile so bright that she felt herself smile in return. Something about that expression also seemed strange. She turned to the glass and saw that her face too seemed... wrong. Her brown skin was streaked with smooth, pale lines and her right eye was a weird, ghostly grey where the other was dark. Streaks of white-blonde shot through her black hair.

"What... where am I?" she asked.

"In the warren," J'kesh replied. "You seem out of sorts, Asah'deh."

Asah'deh. That word seemed strange, yet familiar. "Who are you?" she asked.

"J'kesh," he replied, and that seemed enough. "Try not to worry; you had a bad fall. Tidy up and we'll have supper."

Distractedly, Wood went about the task of clearing the small room, which appeared to be cut from the surrounding rock. There was a dish on the table with a plum lying on it, and she went to pick them up, but her head spun strangely and she half-fell.

Vision blurred and for a moment the plum was not a plum, but an artificial eyeball, and the dish no dish but a steel plate, curved like the side of her face.

"Asah'deh?" Concerned, J'kesh put an arm around her and guided her back to bed. He brought her a dish of stew and sat with her while she ate. "Perhaps it was too soon," he suggested. "You can try getting up again tomorrow."

Days passed, and Asah'deh regained her strength, but still she was troubled. The ancient wood of the dining table stirred strange memories and sometimes she would stare at the window of the cabin for hours, transfixed by patterns that only she could see. Sometimes she would stare at her hands as though there was something beneath the dusky, orange fur that bothered her.

Slowly, she settled, and resumed her place as head of the Jokero household, caring for her brothers and sisters, until one day one of them, J'hered, was brought in injured. He had always been a clumsy boy and had struck his head somehow. Asah'deh tended him until he woke.

He stared at her, struggling to focus. "Wood?" he asked.

Asah'deh started up and moved away, but something on the table caught her eye. At first she thought it was just an old oatcake and she picked it up with every intention of throwing it away, but at the touch of it, her vision swam. She looked to J'Kesh for comfort, but for a moment she saw bare stone instead of wooden walls, and the window was a panel of complex circuits.

"Asah'deh?" She turned to J'Kesh and saw, not the comforting figure of her Jokero brother, but a pale-skinned man with devices wired into his brow. He frowned and the devices clikced and flashed softly. The window-circuits danced and her vision blurred. "It's all right, Asah'deh," he said.

She staggered, her hand tightening on the thing from the table.

"Give me your hand," J'kesh insisted. He held out his right hand and, to accept it, Asah'deh switched the object into her left.

It was like a light had been switched on in her head. Everything was as it had been, but suddenly Wood knew it for a lie. She looked at the bed and saw not J'hered but Anaren, her partner, with a strange coronet fixed around his head.

She reached up with her right hand and ripped a similar device from her own head. J'kesh howled in fury, crying out for his brothers. He drew a knife and flew at Wood, but with her mind now her own again, she knew the device in her hand for a denn'bok and she knew that its use was as familiar to her as breathing. The fighting pike snapped open and swept around, poleaxing J'Kesh, and then back to smash the 'window'.

Anaren sprang up, tearing at his own coronet. "Wood?" he asked again.

"It's me," she replied. "Although..." She held up her flesh-and-blood right arm and gingerly touched the unbroken skin of her face. "I don't know how this happened," she said, "but it will take some getting used to. Maybe he can tell us..." she began, but J'Kesh was already withering, his body shriveling into nothing.

They found their clothes and gear in a cupboard, and with it Wood's cybernetic eye and the face plate it had rested in. She still felt strange, not quite herself, but in her Ranger's robes the feeling was less overwhelming. They found the 'brothers' in a state of shock, and strangely weak given how much time she had spent feeding them. Later they would learn that the healing power which restored her arm and face and had kept J'Kesh alive had been fuelled by their own life forces, but that was later, after they reached the surface.

"You look strange," Anaren admitted.

"Feel strange," she replied, gazing up at the sky. "I'm not sure how I'll manage being normal."

The Minbari laughed softly. "Wood, you are many things; normal is not one of them."

She smiled, for the first time in years a simple smile, untwisted by her disfigurement. It still felt wrong, somehow, not to bear the scars of her near-terminal injury.

"The doctors aren't sure that it will take," Anaren admitted. "You may reject the new flesh now and have to go back to the cybernetics."

"I might prefer that," she admitted. "For now... we'll see," she suggested. "And thank you; for coming after me."

"Thank  _you_ ," he replied, "for not being dead."


End file.
